| Between May and October 1893, Chicago's Jackson Park hosted 27 million tourists to the World's Columbian Exposition, an event that brought the entire world together within a 700-acre park. But by that winter, the former fairgrounds were home to tramps, souvenir hunters, and arsonists, and many felt bewilderment at the rapid pace of the destruction of the Fair. It was designed to be temporary, but with over 200 buildings, a network of pipes, and a series of monumental water features, it seemed too immense to materially disappear. And yet it did; by the following year, most of the remaining surface structures were gone.;The ephemerality of the World's Columbian Exposition encourages an investigation into its place and transformative potential in the imagination of its planners, builders, and tourists. Inspired by recent calls for "eventful archaeology" this research engages with the interplay between event and long-term socio-cultural structures, drawing on the tradition of research on temporal and spatial scales of event.;This dissertation is based on a four-phase archaeological and archival project focusing on the ephemeral "White City" and Midway Plaisance of the 1893 Chicago Fair. The results of excavation in Jackson Park revealed the robust archaeological signature of the extensive sanitary infrastructure of the Fair, the delicate plaster remains of the Fair's Ohio State Building, and bits of mundane domestic items. I demonstrate how each of these clusters of material culture worked to form a network of meaning for Americans in the late nineteenth century and beyond. I explore several currents in late nineteenth-century American urban life to understand the Ohio Building as a literal and imaginary refuge from the confusion, noise, and dirt of the Fair, and how nineteenth-century American touristic practices reflect an ambivalent relationship with modernity's progressive pace. Finally, I assert that the Fair's permanent impact on American culture, from city planning in urban centers, to modeling the proper citizenry for the next century, and to promulgating conceptions of people from non-Western lands in terms of America's own imperial aspirations, is deeply tied to and reinforced by its ephemerality. |
